Thursday, February 12, 2009

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin

To commemorate Darwin's birthday, I hereby announce to my modest and immediate readership an oft-repeated quip of mine - that Darwinistic Natural Selection is a force admitted to operate, even by Creationists (not that I am necessarily one of them, even being, broadly speaking, Evangelical Christian, and one who takes Genesis seriously in some sense), within nature, albeit not sufficient in their eyes to account for biodiversity at the phylum level. Many Creationists (especially the Young Earth sort) even consider it very important to maintain that Natural Selection, and/or very similar forces, is/are capable of rapidly producing biodiversity at the species level (this enables them to account for the multiple species at present in light of the relatively short duration between their proposed Flood date and today, given the Biblical descriptions of the size of the Ark and what it would have been physically capable of holding). As I understand it, most current Creationists hold that while species are mutable, phyla are immutable.

Should I also mention that Darwin, though his profession of Christ, that was so vibrant as a young man so active in the church, declined and was eventually recanted, was a decently firm Theist (with few dips in certainty that temporarily bogged him down with Agnosticism), and by most evidences died while holding to a First Cause view of God?

Should I end my commemoration of Charles Darwin's birthday with some sort of disclaimer about my affirmation of inerrancy, the Athanasian Creed, or of some sort of robust doctrine of Creation?